 Today, in surprisingly connected etymologies, we're biting into some fruit. The words apricot and precocious would seem to have little to do with one another, but in fact, they both come from Latin prie, before, and coquera, to cook ripen. And apricot is an early ripening fruit, and a precocious person is a metaphorically early ripening person. The unusual form of the word apricot is due to the circuitous path it took in getting into English. Latin malum pricocquum, early ripening fruit, became Byzantine Greek bericocchia, which became Arabic albircouk, which became Portuguese albircocqua, which eventually came into 16th century English as apricoc, eventually becoming apricot. The cranberry and the geranium plants aren't related botanically, but etymologically they are. The crann in cranberry comes from low German cron, crane, because of the resemblance of the flower's stamen to the bird's bill. The bird's name comes from Proto-Indo-European gerra to cry hoarsely because of its call. This led to the Greek name for the bird geranos, crane, and thence to geranium from the resemblance of the plant's seed pod to the bird's bill. Can a nectarine be a nuisance? Well, etymologically it can. Nectarine is formed from nectar, which ultimately comes from Greek nectar, the name of the drink of the gods, made up of the elements neck, death, from Proto-Indo-European neck, death, and tar, overcoming, from Proto-Indo-European terra, crossover, pass-through, overcome. Thus, nectar means literally overcoming death. And that death root came into Latin as nakhara, to hurt, producing old French nuire, to harm, and nuisance, harm, wrong, damage, which obviously softened over time to give us the current sense of English nuisance. That Latin verb nakhara, by the way, was also combined with the negative prefix in to eventually give us the word innocent. So perhaps we'd better leave the innocent nectarine alone. You'd probably be grossed out to think of marmalade and mildew together, but etymologically they're connected. Marmalade originally referred to a quince jelly from Portuguese marmelo, quince, originally from Greek melimele, literally honey apple, from meli, honey, plus melon, apple. Yes, a melon was originally an apple. Greek meli comes from Proto-Indo-European melit, honey, which also made it into the Germanic branch of languages, where it becomes the first element of Old English melidao, literally honeydew, the sticky substance left on leaves by aphids, earlier thought to form out of the air like dew. Later on, the word mildew was used to refer to a type of fungus because it was sticky and found growing on plants. What does curling have to do with grapes? Etymology. Curling gets its name from the way the stone curls on the ice, and can be traced back to the root gare, curving crooked. This also produced Germanic crappon hook, and from that old French grape to catch with a hook, pick grapes. So basically the word transferred from referring to the vine hook used for picking grapes to the grapes themselves, replacing the Old English word weenberry, literally wineberry. Thanks for watching! This is one in a series of occasional short videos about connected etymologies. To see more, you can also follow the endless knot on Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram.